In Memoriam: December 2025

David Bellos, a distinguished translator and scholar of French literature, died Oct. 26 at age 80. A bachelor’s and doctoral alumnus of the University of Oxford, he taught in the United Kingdom before joining the Princeton faculty in 1997. Bellos was a biographer and translator of French novelists Romain Gary and Georges Perec. He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2005 for his translations of works by Albanian author Ismail Kadare and the American Library in Paris Book Award in 2017 for The Novel of the Century, about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Bellos was the founding director of Princeton’s Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication.

Alison Isenberg, a historian of urban America and commended mentor, died Oct. 23 at age 63. Isenberg’s work included research into the life and death of Harlan Bruce Joseph, a college student shot and killed by a police officer in Trenton, New Jersey, during the unrest following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. She also taught courses devoted to telling overlooked stories from Trenton’s history. Isenberg joined the Princeton faculty in 2010 after nearly a decade at Rutgers University, and in 2014, she and Stan Allen *88 co-founded the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. Isenberg was a recipient of Princeton’s Graduate Mentoring Award in 2024.